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Do you think parents should have the right to genetically alter a babies DNA to make the Male or Female as they choose?





US: sex selection is permitted to the parents
22:16 2005-03-24


Parents should be allowed to choose the sex of their children to achieve a balanced family, MPs have recommended in a report that has opened up divisions in a parliamentary select committee.

At the moment in the UK, sex selection is only permitted if there are strict medical reasons. This could be because there is a serious sex-linked disorder in the family, such as Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy.

But the MPs say that people who, say, have all boys and want to have a girl should be able to do so.

Alan and Louise Masterton, from Monifieth, near Dundee, are one couple who desperately want a daughter. They have four sons, and their daughter Nicole died in a bonfire accident aged three, tells BBC News.

NR

Why shunt people be able to change there baby male or female

But mothers that do that some times have problems for the rest of there life cuz they never gave the baby that was going to live a chance

i feel kind of bad for umm

It's not something that I personally would choose, but we're just talking about sperm selection here. It's not much different from say... weeding out defective sperm for a routine artificial insemination. Or say... the Christian family that craves yet another child (cause Lord knows, one ain't enough), can't do it on their own, so they turn to artificial insemination, but then, wait!! Now they're going to have septuplets, and because the mother won't have an abortion since it's playing with God's will (but artificial insemination isn't?!), they have all seven babies and have to seek huge amounts of financial support from their community and the government. Can anyone say "McCaughey family"? Pullease... if our society is going to support any one form of reproductive/birth control, then I suppose they all should be supported.

Personally I think it's a petty reason for messing with the reproductive system, but if it's what the family desires, and it does no more harm than any other sanctioned form of reproductive/birth control, then let them go for it.

Cheers,
Loonette

It's not nice to fool with mother nature.....Just another huge can 'o worms mankind can't seem to leave alone. It won't be too many years until it will be possible to predict the slightest genetic defects in fetuses increasing the liklihood of diseases as adults and permit abortions on that basis, thereby weeding out all potentially defective genes. And the possibilities go on & on......

Strange topic? I've heard of these things alittle bit before. As some of you know I'm a Christian. It's hard to pick a side. Do you support the family that wants a girl instead of a fifth boy? Or do you say don't do it. One thing I've learned from Christianity is that God's will is not important in many of our lives. Should we leave reproduction up to God? Another thing I've learned is that we as humans do as we please. Whether God says so or not. And the continuing of technology is making us wonder what we are capable of. So the question is .....Will you honor GOD, or will you honor YOURSELF ? If we could understand who God is, then we should have no problem in trusting him to provide a family that is balanced by his will. I don't have kids or a wife. So i can't sympathize with these families. I just know that if we would trust God and put our faith in him he will take care of our needs. And truthfully thats all we NEED.

Amen.

I don't know much about the science here, but if, as Loonette says, it is just a matter of sperm selection rather than fiddling with the DNA, then I guess I wouldn't be too upset about the idea: not nearly as upset as I would be if it involved genetic modification.

I think this whole area involves some of the toughest questions of social morality around at the moment and they really bother me. Where the hell do you start looking for answers when social values are so uprooted?

Religious types seem to me to be too slickly confident about their supposed ability to distinguish between 'god's will' and human will, and they turn a complex human question into a very simplistic 'religious' one.

Having said that, and allowing for the fact that not all religious types get the same message from on high, I suspect their acceptance of 'god's will' can be translated by a non-believer into a respect for biological and reproductive evolution, which I would share.

My gut feeling is that messing around with the genome is a dangerous and ignorant proceeding, especiallty since the more we find out about how the body works the more we realise how little we actually know.

It scares the hell out of me.

The Bible says that the Will of the Father is - to believe in the One he has sent, Jesus. I feel the same as you SV. This is something i wouldnt wanna mess around with.

bobbtheduck wrote:Why shunt people be able to change there baby male or female

But mothers that do that some times have problems for the rest of there life cuz they never gave the baby that was going to live a chance

i feel kind of bad for umm

Actually what they do is take a number of eggs and fertalize them (what normally happens in artifical insemination as a remarkable number of fetuses are spontaniously aborted) they are then allowed to divide to a certain size (essentially in a test tube), at which point a single cell is removed. This cell is then tested to determine whether it contains an XX or XY 23rd chromosome pair. If the family wants a daughter the XX fetus is.... inserted into the womb and the child is brought to term, hopefully.

The sex is not changed, the child is not hurt, and if the parents did not have kids in the traditional sense, the same procedure is followed for any artificial insemination, it's just that one more test is inculded to see if the fetus will produce a viable child. It's not a sex change, it's not any sort of alteration of the DNA, it's selective breeding for lack of a better term.

And the best part is that genetic tests on infants are remarkably common. Would you want to know if your child was going to have Down's Syndrome? It's only 16 cells right now, can you REALLY call it a child? Can you afford to care for someone with this problem? If yes, you just got another 9 months to prepare yourself for what is going to happen.

I worked at a day centre for people with Down's Syndrome for over a year. It was one of the happiest jobs I have ever done. The clients were wonderful. I loved them. Their parents almost universally loved them, once they got over the initial shock of having a Downs Syndrome child.

Many parents felt that bringing up a Downs Syndrome child was a profoundly valuable experience and taught them things about life and what it means to be truly human that they would not otherwise have had.

Of course it was a matter for much grief and well as joy, especially knowing that their kids would die young, but many said they would not have had it any other way.

The clients themselves were wonderful and had plenty of happiness in their lives.

I don't think there are any easy answers to this, but I definitely think that it is a mistake to fly too readily to attitudes based on the 'commercial' values which dominate our thinking: 'could you afford to bring up this child?' or 'might it interfere with our material lifestyle?' Many of the parents I met admitted that had they known they were carrying a Downs Syndrome child they might have had the foetus aborted, but belived in hindsight that would have been a disaster for them and their child.

The older I get the more I realise that what makes human relationships valuable cannot be reduced to a simple rational calculus, and what is right for people cannot be predicted in advance. There are many ways of looking at this..